{"doi":"10.1002/jhm.13210","title":"Breaking down barriers: Decoding archetypes in hospital medicine research","abstract":"The field of hospital medicine has made progress in growing its research productivity as the clinical practice of hospital medicine has matured. Hospital medicine researchers come from a range of backgrounds, including clinicians and nonclinicians with diverse research expertise in health outcomes, health services research, methodology, data science, informatics, and social science disciplines.1 The growth of hospital medicine research has been supported by an increase in (a) hospital medicine or general medicine research fellowships,2 (b) hospitalist engagement with institutional research enterprises, and (c) the need for quality improvement and/or educational research that aligns with hospital medicine clinical roles and institutional priorities. However, despite the growth of research in hospital medicine, there remains a shortage of hospital medicine researchers3-5 and the field has not yet reached the level of research output seen in other subspecialties.1 Moreover, while hospitalists' daily work often serves clinical, leadership, and educational missions within institutions, the opportunity to progress this work into impactful research and be recognized for it can be lost if the pathways for professional and research-specific skill development that lead to success and ultimately promotion are unclear and/or unrecognized.4 To highlight the diversity of research pathways and the opportunities available for hospitalists to conduct impactful research, we aimed to identify archetypes and associated pathways for hospital medicine researchers. The goals of clarifying distinct pathways of hospital medicine research are to: (a) attract trainees interested in hospital medicine research, (b) demonstrate to current hospitalists that there are both traditional and nontraditional ways to engage in research, (c) highlight the availability and importance of nontraditional research pathways in the field of hospital medicine, and (d) underscore the scientific contributions of hospital medicine research across both traditional and nontraditional pathways to the delivery of high-quality inpatient care. As a newer specialty, hospital leadership may be less aware of and undervalue the scientific expertise and impact hospital medicine researchers make across institutional domains (e.g., clinical, quality, education, and operations).6 Highlighting the diverse career pathways that hospital medicine researchers have available can underscore the depth of scientific expertise in hospital medicine and demonstrate the importance of providing time and financial support to those interested in hospital medicine research. We describe the following four “hospital medicine researcher archetypes”: (1) traditional researchers (i.e., clinician and nonclinician scientists), (2) embedded researchers (i.e., researchers who support [and are paid by] their institutional missions),7, 8 (3) research contributors (i.e., methods and/or operations experts that facilitate multiple projects), and (4) exploratory researchers (i.e., clinicians who conduct single, usually unfunded, small projects). Each archetype, with its respective training, skills, funding, return on investment opportunities, and growth potential, is described in Table 1. While features of each archetype may not be unique to hospital medicine, hospital medicine as a collaborative interdisciplinary field is well suited to support integrated team science across this spectrum, to allow for fluidity between the archetypes over an individual's career, and for individuals to develop expertise across a wide range of disciplines including quality improvement, dissemination and implementation science, medical education, health system operations, and bioethics.9 MD/DO and/or PhD. If MD/DO, usually master's degree (MPH, MSc, etc.). Often completed hospital medicine (or other research) fellowship with training in health outcomes/services research. The first large grant is often a career development award to obtain a","journal":"Journal of Hospital Medicine","year":2023,"id":368253,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":4,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9554,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":378514,"name":"Angela Keniston","orcid":"0000-0003-1399-2881","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":555805,"name":"Marisha Burden","orcid":"0000-0002-8262-3994","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1126190,"name":"Stephanie K. Mueller","orcid":"0000-0001-5576-4356","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":369282,"name":"Valerie M. Vaughn","orcid":"0000-0003-4362-7842","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":514734,"name":"Micah T. Prochaska","orcid":"0000-0002-5629-0137","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":9,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:15:20.453499Z","pmid":"37751396","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}